WEBINAR:On-Demand

"The past month saw steady progress toward the final
2.6.34 kernel release, including the announcement of initial
Release Candidate kernels 2.6.34-rc1 through 2.6.34-rc4. The latter
had an interesting virtual memory bug that added a week of delay (I
will cover that in a future issue), and of course there was already
an incompatible release of the nouveau graphics driver that was
covered in last month's column. But such issues aside, the 2.6.34
kernel is otherwise shaping up to be a good release, including a
number of new features of some note as well as fixes for various
performance regressions that have affected some of the more recent
comparative benchmarks against older releases.

"Amongst the new features in 2.6.34 are the LogFS log-based
flash file system that has been in the works for the past few years
as a replacement for JFFS2/3 (or YAFFS2 even), and support for
asynchronous suspend and resume of devices, which should
considerably improve system suspend and resume times because it
allows for different subsystems to suspend in parallel rather than
sequentially. The inclusion of LogFS support will be of particular
interest to many embedded developers, since it provides a very
scalable journaled flash file system with built-in file versioning
support of the kind needed to really support today's large flash
devices, while async suspend and resume will benefit laptop users
and those working on lower power devices that need to frequently
use suspend."